


Prophets Don't Know Everything

by QDS



Category: The Dark Crystal
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007, recipient:kilroy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-17 09:39:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QDS/pseuds/QDS





	Prophets Don't Know Everything

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kilroy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kilroy/gifts).



Light hits the mirror, fracturing and bouncing to light up the room, and Jen awakes. His eyes open, and he begins to prepare for the day ahead. All the while, Kira still sleeps on. Even once he is ready, the steady rise and fall of her chest continues.

He traces the folds of her hair with the back of his hand. He feels its softness still, but brittleness has settled in with age. He kissed her forehead, and taking his walking stick, slowly leaves their bedroom.

There a many rooms in the Castle, but he pauses before only a few, to look in and see if all is well; his son and his son's wife, the grandchildren, his eldest daughter and her husband. Then finally, he comes to the room that they had turned into Kira's study. There, he taught Kira to read and write, and she in turn had taught him the language of the Podlings. He had shown her geometry and mathematics, while she had taken into the forests to show him where to find healing roots and what language the flowers spoke. There are some beautiful memories in this room, humourous as well as touching.

So many memories after so many years...

At last he arrives in the Crystal chamber. Before him, the Crystal hangs, shining, still every bit as glorious as the day he healed it. There is warmth in its light. He stands for a few moments before it, eyes closed, and feels bathed in it. It was its light that woke him, mirrors across the castle keep the walls lit without a single candle in the day.

Even through that, he remembers how its healing had seemed nothing to the thought that he had lost Kira. The rubble had fallen, and what should have been a joyful destruction had been a painful lost. Time and years had almost let him forget those moments before the Skeksis and the Mystics had merged, but there was always those pangs of near loss.

Learning what they needed to do to keep the Crystal had not been easy, for it had also been a matter of keeping their world. More than once Jen had thought that healing the Crystal had been much simpler than anything he was asked to do now; disputes between creatures and races where brought to them to settle, and unlike the act of joining the Shard to the Crystal, such things had to be healed over time, not in a matter of moments.

"Is there another prophecy to fulfil? Something to take us away from..."

He hadn't quite known what to say next. Kira had smiled, and taken his hand in hers.

"Life isn't always easy," she'd said, and he'd felt his love for her swell deep inside him. She was always gentle and kind, but in many ways wiser in the world than would possibly ever be.

Slowly, he makes his way down the stairs of the Castle, outside to see the lush green lands before him. He can scarcely remember the time before, the days of desolation. But now it was beautiful.

He'd asked a Landstrider to meet him, take him North East. What would have been a day and a half walk when he was young could, Kira has suggested, take about three days. And he does not want to risk it possibly being longer.

The long-limb creature was waiting, and these days, it made the effort to kneel just a little to accommodate Jen's aging body. Once up, he strokes its soft yet leathery sides in thanks. The Landstrider then begins to gallop, and the movement it still a surprise to Jen. He chuckles as the wind begins to breath through his hair.

He is going to see Aughra, for it had been a few years since they had spoken. Now, with the chill that things were about to come to an end for him, he knows that he should before it's too late.

It is only a half-day journey. Still, the sun was warm, and Jen was grateful

He can't ask the Landstrider to take him up to her observatory, so he farewelled the lithe creature, asking her to return the next day and began the climb himself. It had never been easy. Less so now, but he takes his time. Aughra is certainly in no hurry.

Once there, Jen ducked the gripping vines, and made a gentle call at the entrance.

A quick movement, and Aughra is there. She fixes her one eye on him, sniffs him, and nods.

"Of course Gelfling comes now, for you grow old and want to know things. Aughra you think knows things." She turns, and with a sharp wave of her hand, beckons him to follow. "Of course, you are right."

Jen had grown used to Aughra, her shifts in tone and mood like the wind, fierce and calm by turn. Long ago, Jen had suggested the Aughra move into the old palace. She flatly refused; in fact, she'd been insulted by the suggestion, and left the palace in a dignified huff, and returned to her old cavern. Jen took three months (and some gentle, then forceful, coaxing from Kira) to go and seek her out. He found her. Her traps for unsuspecting visitors hadn't changed (but now he had learnt to avoid them.)

She was beginning to rebuild her observatory, and when Jen arrived, she had just finished polishing a stone into a spherical shape. Later that night she showed him in the night sky which planet that stone would represent in her model of the heavens.

Jen had stayed for two days. It was watching her work that he began to understand that he would never, in fact, understand her. There was no one else like Aughra alive.

Aughra gives him food and drink, and they sit together, silent, expect for her clanging of cups and plates and noisy eating. What once frightened him now amuses him, and he feels himself smile at the crazy yet wise woman before him.

She notices, and allows a smirk herself. "You too might become like me. Not for so long, but you might."

Jen can't help feeling a little perturbed by that idea, and so asks her finally what he came to ask her.

"I was wondering...who we should pass the Keeping of the Crystal onto, when we are gone."

Aughra nods. "You and Kira have given the world more Gelfling. A son, two daughters. All married, this is good. And they too have children. But you did wondered, didn't you? You wondered if this would be the time of the Gelfling again. Ah, but that time has past. Long past, Jen. You may be Keepers of the Crystal, but not forever. Your children, and your children's children will be too...but will they be Gelfling always?"

Jen thinks on that. When he and Kira had finally confirmed that they were indeed the last Gelfling, they had somehow resigned themselves to being alone, being only the two of them, apart and yet outside of it. His children were Gelfling of course, but his grandchildren are something else indeed.

Aughra speaks again. "No destruction wrought can ever be total erased. Scars will remain, and perhaps the decline of the Gelfling was that scar." She leans back in her chair, and shrugs. "But is that a bad thing? By the time of the next Conjunction, who knows what will be?"

Aughra has of course not answered his question. One of his children, and perhaps their husband, or wife if his son, is of course the answer. His instinct is his eldest daughter, the most cautious with the most adventurous husband, but as Aughra says, who knows?

He looks around that the observatory. Recalling when he had first seen it, it now actually seemed as if Aughra had improved on it. She'd salvaged parts from the wreckage, found others, and created something that was both old and new. Different, but still as effective and startling as ever.

Thus he wonders that perhaps with destruction, creation could also emerge. Change perhaps not necessarily better, but life, like a curve in the road, taking another direction.

***

Kira stands at the window, and watches the Landstrider run like the wind, legs loping forward faster and faster. Jen sits on his back, slightly hunched, as he is so often these days. Still, he looks confident and calm, prepared for anything that Aughra could throw at him.

Including another Shard should it come to that.

She smiles, and turns to begin her day. Gently, she nudges Shirrgig out of her basket. The little round creature yawns wide, and hops into Kira's arms. Shirrgig is more placid than Kira's old friend, Fizzgig, and though she misses the long gone excitable ball of fur, Shirrgig's easy going nature suits better now.

She moves slowly; these days she uses her wings to keep balance, lifting them slightly so they'll keep her steady.

Her family are beginning to awake as well, a long with the rest of the Castle. Her two youngest dash past her, the girl in low flight, avoiding her brother's grasping teasing hands. It pleases Kira to see that they have spirit, and also no fear of a dangerous world, for their world is no longer any more.

Kira then passes her old study. She looks in, seeing the papers she was reading the night before, recalling her early lessons in writing with Jen. At first, the strange markings had daunted her, and occasionally she'd thrown her quills and paper across the room, snarling at them and at Jen. His expression of utter shock at her outbursts had been enough to calm her down, and gradually he seemed to be able to

Of course, she had had to learn patience when she took him into the marshes, and made several mistakes, trying to eat something that objected very loudly and violently, and making a medicine that caused him to break out in a horrible rash for two days.

She remembers the first time that Jen found food in the forest without her guidance. He had been so pleased, grinning like a child, and she had been so proud. Jen has never quite lost his naivety; it was one of the reasons she still loved him after all this time.

Her eldest granddaughter comes along side her, in a hurry but not so that she didn't give Kira a kiss on the cheek. She is almost at the age when she could marry, but she has told Kira she wants to go exploring across the world. As her grandfather once did. Kira remembers that well, and the reason that he went.

They had lived their early lives convinced they were the only ones. While those feelings had been lifted when they first met, after a few years, they had both wanted to see if there were more Gelfling out there, somewhere, perhaps in another part of the world. Jen travelled long weeks, leaving Kira to take care of the Crystal, but his search was to no avail.

But when Jen returned, Kira told him she pregnant with their first child.

Kira's eldest child, her first of her two daughters, still lives with them, as does her son, the middle child. Their youngest daughter lived as Kira had done, amongst the Podlings, and it made Kira happy to see that she too had the gift of talking to the animals. Jen and her other children learnt enough to communicate, but not to really talk. Nature born was her youngest, and that made her proud.

All three married Podlings, and now their grandchildren laughed through the Castle corridors. There had been much talk of how the grandchildren would look, for never before had Podling and Gelfling intermarried. The results were 10 children whose eyes were round yet pointed, ears neither as prominent as the Gelfling, nor as almost non-existent as the Podlings, while their faces were smooth like Gelfling but they had dimples in their cheeks.

What pleased Kira the most was that her granddaughters all had wings.

The Podlings gratitude had been...overwhelming. Jen and Kira, thrust into roles as leaders, unprepared for a new kind of trial, found support from the Podlings. Like had been like new parents, and the Podlings their wise relatives. And the same had happened again when their children and grandchildren. In fact, Kira knew that Jen had appreciated the help with the children more than he had with the Keeping of the Crystal.

At last, Kira and Shirrgig are outside, and they make their way to the bank of the river. Kira often comes down here, particularly now. Her youngest grandchildren are now playing in the shallows, splashing and crashing about. Water flecks onto Kira's skin, and she relishes its coolness.

A little way down, Kira's son sat with his wife, her head in his lap. Shirrgig sat up and shook her head at them, her equivalent of a wave.

It had taken some years to convince the Podlings to come and live amongst them at the Castle. Not all had come, and that was how it should have been - Podlings preferred being close to the earth, and Kira knew that not all could be in the Castle. For them, as for so many creatures on their world, the Castle held evil memories, as it did for so many on their world, even though its brightness seemed to obliterate and blind out the reign of the Skeksis, with so many years of the Garthim stalking the land, ravaging it and holding it all in their thrall. And though the healing of the Crystal had brought so much good to the land, life was full of tension and hardship. But mostly it had been prosperous, and quiet.

Jen has gone to find out what the future might hold for them. Kira feels confident that he will come back with something that will at least satisfy his concerns. Jen worries an awful lot about the future. It isn't that Kira doesn't; she worries if her children are happy, if her grandchildren are making friends, how the Nebri are living now they aren't being hunted for Skeksis' food. Prophecy and portents can only help so far.

She looks back at the Castle, sparkling as if it had always done, no apparent memory on its walls of what had once been. Then, looking again at her grandchildren, their splashes and their smiles. In her lap, Shirrgig yawns, mouth as wide as Fizzgig's ever was. Kira runs her fingers through Shirrgig's fur, and she remembers the almost throw away words she had spoken to Jen years before.

*Prophets don't know everything.*

  



End file.
